Eye Brain in Maya

I had been working on my Eye Brain animation in Lightwave 9.6. At school we switched to Maya, and so have I. To get an idea how much work it is to port the whole thing, I exported the last Lightwave Scene I created as FBX (using the standard settings) and imported that into Maya. Not too shabby! The first render came out all white since all the lights, which were all spotlights with falloff and shadow, were imported as point lights with no shadow or falloff. Most UV maps even came through, unfortunately only one per mesh though. Oh well.

To get everything back to where I was is going to take a while though. What to do, what to do…

MetroCAF 2009

It has been a hectic time since I accepted the position of MetroCAF 2009 chair about two years ago, but a week ago all the hard work culminated in a successful screening of the best students animations from the NYC metropolitan area. A good crowd of about 350 came out on that cold night.

Just in time students of mine from Montclair State University completed the opening animation:

It was created using Lightwave. I did also work on it a bit and took care of the postproduction.
I will be posting images from the event on the NYC ACM SIGGRAPH site soon.

Stanford Celebrity Meltdown

Yes, I really needed to create this to show how to use particles to melt an object. I originally used the full mesh with 34k points, but even though after being non responsive for an hour and a half Lightwave did finish the calculation of a particle system, working with 3.5k points turned out to be more practical

I was really preparing a lecture on facial animation though....

Particles

No, not another post on physics. At least not directly. In my advanced animation class we are getting to the fun stuff. Yesterday that was particle systems. So in preparation I got to play a bit with the implementation in Lightwave and created these examples:

Did not upload the animation through google video this time. That now requires one to install Gears. I do not really like to install stuff that has a unique identifier (a number) that can be tracked, especially if there is no functional reason for it. Putting that off, at least for now. If anybody knows of security and/or privacy issues related to Google Gears, please comment!

Version 3?

Partly in preparation for classes (okay, that is a bit of a stretch, but I will be teaching Advanced Animation using Lightwave this Spring) I have been playing with Lscript a bit. Lscript is yet another scripting language, this one for Lightwave 3D. Wouldn't it be great if they too switched to Python?

Building upon the Multi Dimensional Eye Virus series, I created this:

A rough test, not much yet. I plan to also render a normal map from this and use that in the next dimension to enable re-lighting.

But first there are syllabi to write, classes to prepare, diapers to be changed...

Stylized Depiction

No, I do not have too much time on my hands, but I couldn't help myself and started building kind of extensive shader node networks in Lightwave for a class on one of my favorite subjects: Stylized Depiction (better known as Non Photorealistic Rendering).

Posted an image on the class blog

Level of Detail

So I have been "off the grid" for a bit. I did start a blog for my students to use as digital workbook. I'm teaching two Lightwave classes right now, and for the one on lighting and rendering I just created this test, using level of detail in Lightwave. Hope to return to regular posts soon!

Too bad internet video does not have an adequate image quality to show off the results of my efforts! Also uploaded it to Google video, but as was to be expected: exact same quality...

Finals

So this is as far as I got with my animation this semester. Hope to find time over the summer to make more happen! This semester the advanced students in my class (students who took my 3D class last Fall as well) also created some animations. I just uploaded a gallery of student work.

Same video on google video

Lost Reference

In my post about the box I build in Lightwave, I referred to an installation I once read about, I think it was about a year ago and it was probably in The New Yorker. I just found my original notes on it: "...like the interactive installation box that closes when you get near it and slowly opens up again some time after you move away". Ha! Now I know where I read about it, I thought. So it was slightly disappointing to see the note next to it: "&rarr get Ref". D'oh!

Anybody know this installation from about a year ago? Anyway, here's a new version of the box:

Bad hair day

Last week in class I mentioned how hair is often rendered from small polygon strips that always face the camera. Can we do that in LightWave? Please? No, not really. But there is a plugin called sasquatch. Et voilà: Jane Hair. LightWave does not come standard with the full hair render plug in, so theses results from "SasLite" are not something any barber could approve of.

A Box

Not the one I'm living in (just kidding), but build to be an antagonist to EyeBrain. How is that going to work? I'm not saying! At least not yet.

Has something to do with an art work I read about a while a go, need to find that reference. Here's a YouTube video of something that is just as annoying: an "Ultimate Machine" that turns itself off as soon as you turn it on (via Boing Boing, via Make)

Head

Been busy, but not with animation. Purchasing a house is a lot of work, and will keep me occupied in the weeks to come. I have been modeling a bit, as a distraction form the legal mumbo jumbo of real estate contracts. The head on the right is the result, build from the mask I created a while ago. The reference images I am using do not show the ears, I think I might have made them a wee bit too big.

Added Tentacle Thing

Heres Yet Another Turnaround, added the tail-tentacle-spinal-cord-thing to my EyeBrain model

Yes, need to work a bit on the rigging and animation of that "tail", and it would be nice to grow some scattered hairs on it

The brain has eyes!

Yes, another brain turn. Now with Eyes. Add a tail and EyeBrain can be animated.

I am doing this in Lightwave since that's what I'm teaching at Montclair State. Have been struggling a bit with the IK system, their base system has some quirks*. There is another system, called IK-Booster, which seems to be easier to manage. Downside is that it is quite different from what I know from other 3D software packages. So it is not something I am going to encourage my students to use, since that knowledge will not be very useful unless they stick to LightWave.

* It seems the IK gets evaluated before any "point at target" constraints, which makes having eyes look at a target a bit harder. Especially if you have these muscles on the side that need to move with it. Finally got rid of all the bones in the muscles and faked it...

Displaced Brain

So here's another brain spin. After discovering that displacement in Blender works just like LightWave, I turned to good ol' Mental Ray, which I used to render this version (from XSI). Real displacement at rendertime that does not need denser geometry to work. The difference is most obvious on the cerebellum (the small part at the bottom).

Turning a Brain Around

When working on my thesis piece at The Ohio State University I started building a brain in Maya (I think it was version 1 back then). I had conceived a scene where what I refer to as EyeBrain would be playing chess with a fleshy blob vaguely resembling an elephant who would be moving the pieces with his trunk. I later cut that scene. As I blogged in January I revived the EyeBrain character recently, so I took the old Maya object, converted it to polygons using Softimage XSI and edited it in LightWave. Got sidetracked over the last months but here is a test render:

Geek alert: skip this next paragraph if you could care less about technical issues. A great feature of LightWave is that it shows image mapped displacement in the interface, in real time Open GL. And it is FAST, also in rendering. Downside is that it seems a shortcut has been taken to accomplish this. The displacement is not based on the surface normal, as it should be, simply displaces along one axis, giving you a choice of displacing along X, Y or Z. Not very useful for an organic object like a brain. So I had to create three displacement maps, one for each axis. Luckily LightWave does enable you to "bake" a normal shader to a texture, so using a texture map of the object normal to determine which map should be active where, I finally got the above result. Not very practical, no. But did I mention it renders really fast?

Update: So there is a way to use the displacement map based on the normals in LightWave. You can add a "normal displace" modifier. I also found out why it works so fast, something I should have guessed: LightWave only displaces the geometry points, not the resulting surface. Aargh!

Nosy Thing

Here's a little test I did to figure out LightWave's rigging system. Have been meaning to blog about the galleries I saw in Chelsea last weekend, posted an image on Flickr. What have I been so busy with? Submitting my animation to festivals, for one thing!

Lightballs

Playing with lights and dynamics, tinkering to see if I am inspired to make a more abstract animation. Character animation should be pursued with caution for it can lead to insomnia and carpal tunnel...

Add colour I must!

Or do I?

EyeBrain Returns Once Again

The Eyebrain 'character' is something I have been toying with for years, and I am contemplating creating a little animation with it to practice animating in Lightwave. This semester the advanced students in my class will try to tackle animation, so I have to get up to speed.

The image on the right is also the result of testing out my new birthday present :)

Got Balls?

I am teaching a 3D Modeling class using Lightwave this Spring. Basically the same class I taught last Fall, but now I also have advanced students doing animation. They have to create the standard first assignment in animation for the next class: a bouncing ball. Here is what I created as a test.